epitome of audacious
Jeff Madrick’s Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present is an attempt to chronicle the emergence and persistence of this pattern.
HONORING HER MEMORY
Christina Taylor Green (9/11/2001 - 1/8/2011)
"I just want her memory to live on, she's a face of hope, a face of change," she said. "Stop the violence, stop the hatred." Mother quote
A life bracketed by two national tragedies: born on the day (9/11/2001) of the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York; died on the day (1/8/2011) of the tragic shootings in Tucson, Arizona.
All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations. Obama quote
Obama Arizona Speech: 'I Want America To Be As Good As She Imagined It'
The first thing you need to know about the cycle of financial overreach, crisis, and bailout is that it was not always thus. The United States emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated financial sector, and for about forty years those regulations were enough to keep banking both safe and boring. And for a while—with memories of the bank failures of the 1930s still fresh—most people liked it that way.
Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, however, both the political consensus in favor of boring banking and the structure of regulations that kept banking safe unraveled. The first half of Age of Greed describes how this happened through a series of personal profiles.
The nation's five largest mortgage servicers -- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial -- have also been the focus of a federal investigation into whether the banks defrauded taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures
The recession might be officially over, but American views toward the institutions that brought the economic system close to collapse have never been worse.
According to a new poll by Gallup, 36 percent of Americans now say they have "very little" or "no" confidence in U.S. banks, the highest percentage on record since Gallup first started tracking that data. Those saying they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in banks has also stagnated, stuck at 23 percent for the second straight year, after falling to a low of 22 percent in 2009.
Gallup, who has been tracking confidence in banks for over thirty years now, notes the steady decline of confidence in their release, pointing out that 60 percent of Americans had at least "quite a lot" of confidence in banks in 1979. That fell to 30 percent in the early 1990s, but then steadily rose to 53 percent in the mid-200s.
The percentage of Americans with a good deal of trust in banks has been nearly halved since 2007:
But we could also be talking about 1991, when the consequences of vast, loan-financed overbuilding of commercial real estate in the 1980s came home to roost, helping to cause the collapse of the junk-bond market and putting many banks—Citibank, in particular—at risk. Only the fact that bank deposits were federally insured averted a major crisis. Or we could be talking about 1982–1983, when reckless lending to Latin America ended in a severe debt crisis that put major banks such as, well, Citibank at risk, and only huge official lending to Mexico, Brazil, and other debtors held an even deeper crisis at bay. Or we could be talking about the near crisis caused by the bankruptcy of Penn Central in 1970
posted by Paul Servelle @ 6:57 AM
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